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Saturday, September 21, 2013
The Comparative Drama Conference, 2014
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
The Faculty Research Colloquium
The
Department of English presents:
The Faculty
Research Colloquium
Earth
by Lowell Duckert
This
presentation confronts one of the gravest environmental issues today,
mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia and Appalachia, on unlikely ground:
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notions of the “prospect.” Derived from the
Latin prospectare and prospicere, the “prospect” was more than a mining term;
it could denote that which faces forward in time and space, the relative senses
of such, or a view itself. But “prospect” could also describe an action – to
face forward, to situate, and the anticipated results of such. I will focus on
one earthy text in particular, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667/74), not just
to show how mining has devastating ecological consequences (it does), but also,
and more importantly, to argue that mining is an ecotheoretical means of
conceptualizing different “prospect[s] wide / And various” (5.88-9), a way of
wondering about better futures on and with the Earth/earth. Earth faces the
human in prospective directions; the look downward is simultaneously a look
forward in time. Borrowing a phrase from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who
believe mines are non-teleological “lines of flight” that transport bodies
across “smooth spaces” of becoming, I believe that mines of flight have the
ability to create nature-culture assemblages of desire in addition to
socio-economic squalor, environmental sickness, and geological ruin. Coalfield
sociologist Rebecca R. Scott has recently examined the (illogical) “logic of
extraction” that perpetuates the environmental injustices of MTR. My hope is
that the early modern “prospect” alters contemporary debates that harmfully
divide humans from the landscape and pit economic interests against
environmental ones—offering us, instead, prospective futures in which the lives
of both humans and nonhumans are mutually enriched.
September
25, 2013
2:30
p.m., 130 Colson Hall
Newberry Library Fellowships!
Midwest Modern Language Association Department of English, Loyola University Chicago1032 W. Sheridan Road | Chicago, Illinois 60660 phone 773.508.6083 | fax 773.508.6062 email: mmla@luc.edu | www.luc.edu/mmla |
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Monday, September 16, 2013
Calliope Informational Meeting
Contact: Mary Ann Samyn, 304-293-9730
Calliope,
WVU’s Literary Magazine, to Host Informational Meeting
A meeting of undergraduate students
interested in working on Calliope,
WVU's award-winning undergraduate literary magazine, will be held on Tuesday,
September 17, at 7:00 p.m. in room 130 of Colson Hall. Calliope’s editor-in-chief, Caleb Stacy,
and faculty advisor, Mary Ann Samyn, will talk with students interested in
editorial positions (managing editor, fiction editor, poetry editor, etc.) as
well as students interested in contributing in other ways to the editorial and
publication process. No experience is necessary! Enthusiasm is a
plus!
Students who are not able to attend the meeting but would like to be on the Calliope staff should email or call the magazine's faculty sponsor, Mary Ann Samyn, at maryann.samyn@mail.wvu.edu /304-293-9730.
Questions should be addressed to Professor Samyn.
Students who are not able to attend the meeting but would like to be on the Calliope staff should email or call the magazine's faculty sponsor, Mary Ann Samyn, at maryann.samyn@mail.wvu.edu /304-293-9730.
Questions should be addressed to Professor Samyn.
Monday, August 26, 2013
Otter Nonsense
Graduate alumna Kerry Hogan (Kerry Hughes as was) has called the Tenants' attention to Discourse on the Otter, a Tumblr blog that, um, enlivens quotations from contemporary theory, as demonstrated by this gem derived from Judith Butler:
The Tenants are particularly taken by the quote from Richard Nixon, but we'll let you discover that for yourselves. Thanks to Kerry for giving us a good laugh at the start of the school year.
Cheat River Review
---Cheat River Review is the MFA program's new online literary journal. But you already knew about that, right? In any case, here's the very pretty web site... take a look and help us spread the word, ok?
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Virginia Butts Sturm Creative Writing Scholarship
English
majors who are currently pursuing the Creative Writing Concentration and have
completed at least three credit hours in the concentration are encouraged to
apply for the Virginia Butts Sturm Creative Writing Scholarship.
Virginia Butts Sturm Workshop
The
Department of English announces
Janisse Ray
2013 Virginia Butts Sturm Writer in Residence
Through the
generosity of the Sturm endowment, students
at West Virginia University are given the opportunity to study for one week
with a nationally renowned visiting writer in a workshop setting. Janisse Ray, author of The Seed
Underground and Ecology of a Cracker
Childhood, is the writer selected to lead the 2013 Virginia Butts Sturm
Writer-in-Residence Workshop, which is scheduled for September 30-October 4.
The Sturm Residency sponsors the writer in a free public reading, which will be held on Monday, September 30, at 7:30 p.m. in the Gold Ballroom, WVU Mountainlair.
Janisse Ray is a writer, naturalist, and activist. Her publications include five books of literary nonfiction and a collection of poetry. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called Ray’s most recent book, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food, an “enchanting narrative—part memoir, part botany primer, part political manifesto.” The Seed Underground has won several awards including the Nautilus Gold Book Award Better Books for a Better World in the Green Living Category, the American Horticultural Society Book Award, and the American Society of Journalists and Authors Arlene Eisenberg Award for Writing that Makes a Difference. Her highly acclaimed Ecology of a Cracker Childhood was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2000. Ray holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and she is on the faculty of Chatham University’s low-residency MFA program. She lives on a farm in Southern Georgia.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
MFA Annual Rooftop Reading
by Rebecca Doverspike
On the last Thursday before before the start of the Fall 2013 semester, we held our 3rd annual Rooftop Reading at Cafe Montmarte atop Hotel Morgan. Such a reading began, thanks to our COW predecessors, during my first year entering the MFA program and it was such a wonderful welcoming that it turned into tradition. We couldn’t have asked for clearer weather—light blue skies and a sun setting just a little faster than during the heart of summer—as we heard from 3rd and 2nd years as well as some brave 1st years. Thanks to Cafe Montmarte for hosting, all the COW officers (especially President Hannah McPherson) for putting on the event, everyone who attended and those who read, and, to our ever-encouraging faculty. It was wonderful to reunite and meet new faces, and geared us all up for an energetic and productive year. Below are some photos (all courtesy of Fiction Professor Glenn Taylor):
MFA Director Mary Ann Samyn and English Chair Jim Harms (both fantastic poetry professors), ready to listen.
2nd year nonfiction writer, Sadie, gives us witty and thought-provoking insight as she ponders how childhood experiences shape a person.
2nd year MFA, Xin Tian, reading her ever-eloquent poetry.
2nd year poet and CRR Editor, Patric, reading powerful words involving loss and bus rides (sometimes interwoven).
2nd year MFA and COW President Hannah McPherson reading some thoughtful creative nonfiction about her time in Turkey.
Writers come in all heights! From front to back: Sadie, Morgan, Mari, and John.
Some old and new MFAs chatting after the reading.
Friday, July 19, 2013
College hooligans of 1955
For your weekend delectation, this bit of WVU campus history that I came across while doing some research in the West Virginia and Regional History Collection. Couch-burning is, clearly, only the most recent manifestation of student misconduct.
From a letter written by then-WVU President Irvin Stewart to the Board of Governors, dated November 11, 1955:
Gentlemen:
You have undoubtedly seen reports of the panty raid at the University last night. The incident was undoubtedly a result of the rising temperature in connection with the Pitt football game.
Apparently the incident was spontaneous in origin. According to reports, there was no evidence of organized activity as late as 11:00 p.m....Sometime around 11:30, a small group seems to have started toward Women's Hall, yelling "Panty Raid." Someone (perhaps a member of the original group) called WAJR to report that a panty raid was in progress. The report came during a disc jockey program and was immediately put on the air. This served to draw students in from all parts of town.
I was asleep shortly before midnight, when I was told of the raid. I immediately dressed and went to Women's Hall, where I met Mr. Gluck, Dean Betty Boyd, and Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds, Edwin Orr, who told me that the last of the raiders had been cleared out of the dormitory and had started toward the sorority houses. I went after the group as rapidly as I could and was a party to dispersing the groups in front of the Kappa Kappa Gamma, Alpha Xi Delta and Delta Gamma sororities....
There was one unfortunate episode which served to give the panty raid more notoriety than it might otherwise have received. The Delta Gamma House was rather late on the list of those visited and the occupants had had an opportunity to prepare themselves. Part of the preparation consisted of hooking a hose to the water tap on the second floor. I got through the crowd of men in front of the sorority and reached the front line of the group just as the hose was turned on. Some of the water came down on my hat and some hit Mr. Gluck, who arrived about the same time. As we were recognized, the water was turned off, but apparently somebody at the sorority told the newspapers of the incident and it will doubtless receive considerable play in the newspaper stories."
Not sure which is the "unfortunate episode" in that last paragraph: President Stewart's hat getting wet, or the story's being leaked to the paper. I like to imagine it's the former.
At any rate, it's clear that then. as now, most college students' prefrontal cortexes were not fully developed.
Wonder if there's been any feminist scholarship on the phenomenon of the panty raid, though? There certainly should be.
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